Three History Lessons (Two of them Scary)

We did some rare Monday/Tuesday TV watching this week-- normally there is no screen-time for our kids from Monday through Thursday-- but I invoked the "documentary rule" twice on two consecutive days; both of these stream on Netflix:

1) Alex and I consumed about half of the documentary Fed Up, which documents the rise of fat-free foods, added sugar, sugar addiction, and the big sugar lobby . . . it's important information but presented in an incredibly sad manner, from the perspective of a number of morbidly obese children and their families . . . the lesson is that companies are pushing hyper-palatable processed foods with tons of added sugar and so unless you eat real food and avoid soda and juice, you're going to be consuming a lot of unwanted sugar; a calorie is not a calorie-- 100 calories of nuts is processed totally differently than 100 calories of gummy bears . . . the scariest statistic is that there were zero cases of childhood "adult onset" diabetes in 1980 and now there are 60,000 cases; unfortunately, even if you do eat real food, chicken isn't even chicken, so you're pretty much screwed unless you have your own organic farm;

2) Ian and I watched Command and Control, a PBS documentary that recounts the Titan II nuclear missile silo explosion that happened in Arkansas in 1980; it's a gripping story, with plenty of footage of nuclear blasts, wild anecdotes from old time rocket scientists, Cold War context, and a detailed narrative of the Arkansas catastrophe-- including the surrounding media carnival; not only are there plenty of moving moments and tales of heroism, but there's also frustrating ending-- the soldiers involved were treated quite shabbily by the Air Force once the incident was over and there's still plenty of room for error with our current nuclear arsenal . . . I think I'm going to read the Eric Schlosser book that inspired the film;

3) and here's a history lesson that's a little less heavy . . . although I guess D. Boon's demise even puts a tragic spin on this jazzy and light-hearted punk number.